


you can only take what you can carry

by rarmaster



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: (nothing graphic just discussed), Anna's a rebel babey and i love her, Character Study, Gen, Human Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27996531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: on the topic of Anna Irving, and what her life was like before it was over. snapshot exploration of (a version of) her past. character study of who she is, and why.or: [furiously dumps all my Anna headcanons into a fic]
Relationships: Anna/Kratos Aurion
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	you can only take what you can carry

**Author's Note:**

> title from snow patrol's _if there's a rocket tie me to it_
> 
> i initially wrote this for an rp app and then i was like. damn this is some good prose. so i trimmed it a little and i'm posting it here, now. any canonverse anna i write almost definitely has this backstory lol even though i didn't really go into Depth about her family. (if you're interested a i've got a post about them [here](https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/37915.html))

When Anna is twelve years old—just old enough to really properly understand how terrible the Desians actually are—they burn her house down. Her and her dad stand in the rubble and her dad sighs, and she clings to his hand.

Her dad tells her that the Desians aren’t doing this because they’re inherently superior to anyone else, they’re just doing it because they’re assholes. Anna takes the message to heart, and then asks, very tentatively, what they’re going to do about their house that stands as ashes before them.

Her father grins down at her, tired but confident, and tells her that they’ll rebuild. That’s just what they _do_.

The thing is: rebuilding is what Luin is used to. Luin is a red mark on the Desian’s map, because unlike any other town in Sylvarant, Luin refuses to make a deal with its neighboring Desians just to get them off its back. The people of Luin could never be satisfied with keeping their heads down—so they rebel, they fight back, they get raided, they rebuild. That’s what Luin does.

When she’s thirteen, Anna meets the man who she’ll one day call Papa, and the girl she’ll one day call sister. Her dads fall in love. She and her sister raise hell—for their fathers, for their town, and most importantly for the Desians.

Because that’s thing. Both of Anna’s fathers are rebels at heart, unable to keep their heads down, and they raised Anna and her sister to be the same. Are they aware their blatant disrespect is likely to earn them nothing more than a beating before they’re carted off to the nearest ranch? Yes. Is that going to stop them? Absolutely not. They’re _Irvings._ They don’t take things _lying down._

When Anna is nearly twenty, there’s a raid worse than the others. All of Luin is burned. Those that aren’t killed are carted off to the ranch.

Anna gets unlucky. She lives.

Worse, she’s chosen as a host for the Angelus Project.

“Inhumane” barely begins to cover the things they do to her.

Anna doesn’t take it lying down, of course. She’s an Irving. That’s not what they _do._ Whether captivity, abuse, or torture—it doesn’t matter. She’s a fighter, she’s a rebel, she has spent her whole life resisting. So she fights back. She argues when they try and call her something that isn’t her name. She never shuts up. Does not let them silence her. Does not let them break her. She’s used to taking hits and picking herself back up, afterwards. That’s what living in Luin was _like._ And it’s harder, yes—when it’s just her, and she has no village, no friends, no family to support her. But she fights anyway. It’s all she knows how to do.

She tries to escape, again and again and again, refuses to be deterred by how severe the punishment is for not making it. She gets further and further each time. Halfway through an escape attempt, she bumps into someone who doesn't look like a Desian. She almost cuts him open with the knife she stole, anyway, not wanting to take any chances, but then he puts his hands up and asks her, very gently, if she might be Anna Irving.

It's the first time anyone's called her by name in years.

He introduces himself as Kratos, explains that he is a mercenary, and her father has promised a very large sum of money if he can just manage to get her out of the ranch and back home safe. This is really neither the time nor place to question his legitimacy, or get worked up about the money thing, or to ask which father it was who asked and if the other is alright, nor is it the time to doubt—and Anna does doubt, for a moment. That maybe this is an elaborate trap. But Desians lay bloody at Kratos’ feet and that sword in his hand is a promise, and even the slimmest chance of freedom sings in Anna’s veins like a siren song too loud to resist. So she goes with him.

And she tastes freedom for the first time in almost five years.

Of course it's not as simple as going back home to her father, never seeing the strange mercenary again, and living happily ever after. No. They're ambushed three times before they even make it back to Anna's father. It seems that the Desians aren't exactly keen on letting the stone in her collarbone go. If Anna hadn't seen what happened to other prisoners who had attempted to remove theirs, she would have just yanked the damn thing out of her neck and thrown it at the Kvar's feet. But she knows. If she does, she'll die. If she does, she could do worse than die. Transformed into a hideous monster, attacking blindly, unable to recognized loved ones or anything else, with the only option from there being _put down_ like a feral animal?

Better to leave the damn stone alone.

When they meet up with Anna’s father—her Papa—he is first of all overjoyed and relieved to see Anna again. (Her Dad and sister are both dead.) It turns out that, despite there being safer options, her Papa is helping lead an anti-Desian resistance group. Anna, of course, is thrilled about this, though she needs some time to recover from the ranch before she’ll be ready to do any serious resistance work. Kratos decides to stay for reasons he’s only ever vague about.

It takes some needling, but eventually Anna _does_ get the whole truth out of him. It’s not that he was trying to keep it a secret, exactly. He just found it too complicated to begin to discuss with ease, and—some pains, some griefs? They’re easier just not to talk about. But Anna asks, so Kratos tells her.

He tells her about the war, four thousand years ago, that would not end. The king he betrayed for a pair of half elves who actually seemed keen on fixing this whole mess. Mithos, the idealist, and his older sister Martel. Anna knows those names ( _who doesn’t know about the goddess Martel and the hero Mithos who died to end the war?_ ), but she keeps quiet, lets him speak, knowing that if she interrupts she might not get anything more out of him at all. Kratos tells her about their travels, him and Mithos and Martel and another half elf named Yuan ( _it is no wonder, Anna reflects, that Kratos' relationship with being human is so complicated, even before the angel thing. His whole family is made of half elves, and humanity excommunicated him for choosing the “wrong side”_ ). He tells Anna about ending the war. About Martel, dying a martyr, and how they fell apart in her absence.

He tells Anna about the goddess they created in Martel's memory. A goddess who never existed. A religion they forged from the ground up. He tells her about the world they broke apart, because splitting it in two was the only way to get the fighting to _end_. A world they ruled from the shadows. About their plans to restore the great tree in order to give mana back to the world, plans that were later abandoned in favor of resurrecting Martel, one way or another. Mithos went mad. Yuan left. Kratos stayed, and watched his little brother deteriorate, all the while.

Whose idea were the ranches, Anna asks. Kratos says he can't remember. He says he probably should have stopped it.

Anna asks why he didn't stop any of it. Kratos says that by the time he realized Mithos needed to be stopped, it was too late to do anything.

You don't believe that, Anna argued. When he tried to protest, she pressed on: you don't because if you did, you would still be with him, right now, and instead you're here.

Kratos admitted, finally, that she was right. It _was_ too late for him to dismantle the Desians—dismantle Cruxis, the organization behind both the Desians and the church of Martel—from within, seeing as everyone in the organization counted him a traitor. But maybe, he admitted, maybe he could do something else.

(It would just have to wait until Anna was a little stronger, had recovered more. Kratos was not in a hurry, not if it put her life on the line.)

And: here’s the thing, about traveling with someone for a long period of time. You get to know them incredibly well. Incredibly, incredibly well.

Not that Anna would say falling in love was _inevitable_. Inevitable implies that she could not have chosen to walk, at any moment, implies that she never made the conscious decision to say yes. Inevitable implies that she did not have a choice in the matter at all.

But Anna did choose. Day in, and day out, she chose. Him, of all people.

Kratos Aurion, hero, tyrant, grieving coward. The love of her goddamn life. The man who stopped everything to steal her sweetcakes from a market stall because she hadn't had one in she couldn't remember when. The man who made sure they celebrated both her birthday and the anniversary of her freedom, regardless of where they were or what other responsibilities they had. The man who smiled shy and had the sharp kind of humor that took her off guard and drove her nuts in all the good ways.

Brave, smart, shy Kratos, who promised her the world and spent every day atoning for mistakes too big for any one man to have to shoulder.

Bold, brash, rebellious Anna, who stood up in the face of oppression and said this is wrong and paid for her words and survived the price, who wasn't afraid of attempting to do something about it again, because never, _ever,_ would she bow her head and do nothing in the face of injustice.

She thinks, if they'd had time, they could have changed the world together.

They don't get that time.

First of all, it is very hard to be a wildly successful rebel hero when you are pregnant. Second, having a child makes you think twice about throwing yourself headfirst into every dangerous situation possible. ( _Kratos offers once, moving to Tethe'alla, where there are no Desians and they could stop living in hiding and raise their son safely. Anna tells them that's cowards’ talk and she's Anna Fucking Irving and she’s never run from anything in her life._ )

Lloyd spends the first three years of his life raised by a group of rebels who love him almost as dearly as his parents do, which is quite, _quite_ dearly.

And then the call comes. Desians spotted. A search party. Still looking for Anna and the stone in her neck, even after five years.

So they pack up the essentials and Lloyd and they start moving.

The rebels were already in Iselia—a backwater, tiny Sylvarant town—at the time, or near it, perhaps a camp in the hills—It doesn't matter, where, exactly, they were running from. It doesn't even really matter where they intended to run to.

What matters is that Kvar brought a literal actual army after them, and not even Kratos Aurion can take down an army single handed.

There’s a forest, up on the cliffs of the mountain Iselia rests under.

And it's in this forest, on these cliffs, that Kvar catches Anna, removes her exsphere.

The rest is a story that’s already been told.


End file.
